Are you sure that’s a quote from Burns and Allen? It sounds very out of character for them. They were often absurdist (and very non-PC), but I didn’t think they were ever that nasty.
Well, what can you expect from bigots? They’re morons. Of course they’re going to miss the point.
Couple of comments:
The 50’s were a lot different, and comments like Gracie’s were pretty much the norm. Not only were the shows in black and white, so were a lot of people’s mentality. Joe McCarthy was the final straw back then.
Regarding All In The Family, like many viewers back then, my father was somewhat of an Archie Bunker himself…yet he would watch the show with me. The show was important in that it made things less black and white for my father and myself. He would say, “Archie has a point…” and we would battle it out. However, when I once told him how I thought it was disgusting how he used the same, and worse, words for other nationalities and cultures, he admitted it was pretty stupid on his part, and he started to clean up his act. Thing was, that was simply the way he was brought up, and that was the way he and his buddies always talked. I thank All In The Family for getting him to even consider this was not a good thing.
I still remember when the first television show came on the air that starred a “negro”…it was Julia, with Diane Carroll…a wretched show, but ground breaking all the same. I also remember seeing the first commercial with blacks - this is what life was like back then. The US was not an enlightened bunch of folks. People forget it wasn’t all that long ago that blacks could not use the same restroom, water fountain or restaurant as white folks, and pregnant, unmarried girls were sent to Europe (or back alley quacks) for abortions or shipped off to homes for unwed mothers. They weren’t even allowed to use the word “pregnant” on I Love Lucy back then.
I do, however, find the joke about the triplets becoming twins - well, I am dubious. That sounds pretty cruel even for those days.
My favorite joke was from the Burns and Allen tv show:
Gracie: I have to go buy a toaster from Paris.
Neighbor: Why do you want to buy a toaster from Paris?
Gracie: George loves French toast.
If I recall correctly they had N*****head oysters up to the 60’s where it was then changed to Negro head then finally dropped altogether. I was unable to find a link but I think I read it somewhere.
CaptainAmazing - good job on picking up on that ambiguous pronoun reference. (I love those).
One of my favorites was from the show “Police Squad”:
“We found the ransom note. We sent it to the lab. They want a million dollars”.
Leslie Nielsen replies “Why does the lab want a million dollars?”
Sorry for the hijack. 
I can’t speak for Ivylass’ intent, but I agree that All in the Family might get viewed as a racist show nowadays. When it comes to people raising protests over offensive TV shows, movies, songs or video games, content appears to win out over context every time. IOW, it desn’t matter what kind of person the Archie Bunker character is meant to represent, if the Organization of Offended Citizens hears a racist word on program X, program X is branded a racist program and the network that airs it (as well as the companies that sponsor it) is accused of supporting racism.
That wasn’t my intention, for all it’s worth…
TERRA Rising, I think maybe you’ve been misunderstood. Did you mean that there are some people so intent on being non-judgemental that they would see Hitler as just “someone who disagrees with us” rather than a real danger to be dealt with? I’m pretty sure you weren’t advocating a general policy of using a .50 caliber rifle to end debates.
George really let Gracie have all the good lines. However, if you watch their show, which is on TVLand on Sunday mornings, you’ll see that Gracie was always exasperating everyone including George. She would just come out with some of the -dumbest- remarks I’ve ever heard, and she said her lines with a straight face. I don’t know how, though. The comedy is in watching all the other characters deal with Gracie.
“Did you kill a lot of japs, Popeye?” - One of Popeye’s nephews
(paraphrasing; I don’t recall the exact wording)
Yeah, ignorance can be impenetrable.
OTOH, there is among many the suspicion that an Archie Bunker type character these days would need to be cast as being the devil himself, acting out of sheer malice, lest someone complain of “sympathetic portrayal”. The cleverness behind Archie was that we could see his behavior derived from ignorance, not from a desire to be evil.
On to the OP question – actually I think the general public opinion would not be hostile to hearing something like that said in modern media, if it were for instance Usama bin Laden. There is a difference between casually “wishing death on someone” just because you think they deserve it, and advocating finishing off an enemy with whom you are in a state of shooting war. The later is a reasonable policy choice. ( Which BTW is not the same thing as “disagreeing with us”, either, TERRA Rising. Put down the Straw Idealist)
The other thing about A.B. is that although he was ignorant and bigoted, he had his positive side as well, such as being a loving husband and father. I fear you’re right that today he would have to be portrayed as a wife-beater as well.
Baldwin, that was my point. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly eloquent to express my viewpoint.
I doubt deady-baby jokes were any more mainstream then than they are now. The closest Burns-Allen joke I could come up with was:
George: I didn’t know you had twin sisters.
Gracie: They really should be triplets, because I think Alice is two-faced.
Which isn’t very close at all, but it made me laugh.
I saw “His Girl Friday” (1940) last week. The plot hinges on an impending execution. The leading characters accept as given that the killer is being hung because the victim was “colored” and the mayor and sheriff are up for reelection. It struck me that if the movie were remade today you wouldn’t have three white people matter-of-factly talk about politicians pandering to minorities without some sort of debate or comment on race, law enforcement and politics.
I had that feeling as well, however I don’t know. Furthermore, what he wrote was
which is quite easily interpreted as “it’s OK to kill people just because they disagree with us and anyone who thinks otherwise is a moron”. The “who will say…” part hints at your interpretation, but isn’t clear.
I also think that it’s very clear the Hitler wasn’t just someone who disagreed with us, nor Osama bin Laden. I think the “idealists” or “morons”, whichever label you use, understand this as well.
What about Bill Cosby on I Spy (1965-1968)? That debuted three years before Julia. Cosby won the Emmy for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Series.
And before that, there were:
Beulah (1950-1953), with Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, and Amanda Randolph alternating in the title role.
Amos ‘n’ Andy (1951-1953), starring Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams.
Ok, after looking around I haven’t been able to find the original of that joke either. I could’ve sworn I heard it here attributed to them, though. Sorry 'bout that.
I remember some comic on the old “Solid Gold” series telling this joke:
“I’ll never have another dog that was previously owned by a Black guy. Every time it gets on the couch, and I tell it to “Get down,” it starts dancing.”
Actually, the proto-Archie was a much less ambiguous character. The show was originally conceived as Justice For All (adapted from the British show Till Death Do Us Part) and “Archie Justice” was a cruel husband and father. Although it tested well with audiences, nobody would pick it up because it was just “too much.”
Luckily, Harlan Ellison was in one of the test audiences, and used his LA Free Press television column, The Glass Teat, to gripe that the network system was too cowardly to take on a ground-breaking show that audiences loved. He wouldn’t let it go, either-- he wrote one entire column on it, and then kept bringing it up week after week, making unfavourable comparisons between what was actually on the air, and “the TV you’ll never see,” like Norman Lear’s Justice for All. Those columns created an undeniable interest and considerable pressure, which probably had a lot to do with CBS’s decision to give it a chance.
By the time it made it to air, though, the show was pretty much unrecognizable. All of the characters had hard edges removed, mum was less fearful and more comically deferential, the kids were more buffoonish, but most of all, Archie was a much gentler, more sympathetic character. And you can bet Harlan bitched about that.
The documentary I saw a few months back said the big deal was that she was the first black woman to star on a tv show, not the first black person.